Our place in France Chapter 6

Our week started abruptly when we were startled awake by an absolutely humongeous crash which I swear shook the house! Was it World War 3? Had aliens landed on the roof? No, neither of those. It was the sound of one of our overloaded camping-style wardrobes giving in to gravity and crashing to the floor. Fortunately none of the supports were damaged at all and having disentangled the clothes and the parts of the wardrobe, we could re-erect it again with much less in it. Later that morning we attached it to the wall and made sure that the second one was leaning against one of the beams. We are not into early mornings at the best of times, and being shocked awake has got to be bad for us, surely?

Although we emptied the last box in the house last week, I did mention that there were still quite a few down in the cave so this week we have been concentrating on those. In fact there were rather a lot down there and many of them said ‘Books’ which I just didn’t believe. As it turned out, I was half right. Photograph albums, postcard albums and cookery books are also books but in my mind I had thought only of reading books. It made a lot of heavy carrying to get the books that we had space for to their rightful homes.

Because we have had to reassign our available storage space to accommodate our needs, we have suddenly found ourselves with rather more possessions than we can deal with and most of it gets sent down to the cellar. I am loath to just pile stuff in there though, so believe it or not, we trotted off to Emmaus, a shop which sells donated goods of all sorts, for charity, to look for an old wardrobe. However, we were out of luck and came away empty handed. Some of the stock moves quite fast though so we will try again in a few weeks’ time.

Also this week, we finally got the hand rail for the front steps which had been made up for us by a light engineering works not far away. We discovered that the rail around the veranda is a standard design as are the scroll ends. All we had to do was buy a suitable length of rail and two scroll ends and they would weld it together for us in no time at all. Haha! I think it was such a small job that it kept on getting shelved because no time at all ended up being nearly three weeks. But it is here now and has almost been fitted. Getting it here was a whole other story! The entire rail is just short of three metres so it had to be carefully posted through the back of the car and out of the front passenger window well wrapped with towels to protect the paintwork etc. Said passenger then had to hang on to this thing all the way home as it threatened to take off if not held down. Thank goodness it was a short trip! The brackets have now been fitted and it has been painted to match the existing rail and I hope, will be an asset to anyone attempting our somewhat uneven front steps.

We seldom get out and about in the early mornings but in the evenings when we are about, we often see deer grazing in the lands around here. There are small patches of woodland between the fields and we think that is where they hide out during the day. It is always a delight to see them and to know that wild animals are tolerated alongside the farming. While we were staying in our friends’ gite, we saw rabbits quite often when we had been out at night, and that too, was a delight.

We finally got the grandfather clock going, after Neels had spent a lot of time trying to find out what was wrong with it. In the end, he discovered that the packers, in an effort no doubt, to silence it, had stuffed bubble wrap right up into the chimes and had distorted them. Fortunately it could be fixed and now we once again have the wonderful mellow sound of the chimes in the house.  It is really beginning to look and feel and sound like home. We have hung up two of our many pictures, but there are a lot more to go.

Last night, for the first time since we have been in the house, we did not make a fire. Could Spring be on the way? Probably, although tomorrow is forecast to be cold and rainy again. The daffodils are out and making a fine showing and the fruit trees are just starting to have a simmer of pink or white blossom, so all is not lost. No doubt the temperature will do as it does in South Africa going up and down, up and down, until it eventually settles into the next season. Spring is so lovely here that I feel that South Africa is in some way deprived for not having four definite seasons.

Our place in France Chapter 5

I think we can say that this was a week of small delights. A small delight is something fairly trivial which gives one pleasure and which under different circumstances could easily pass unnoticed. The first was when Neels came out of the bathroom on a chilly morning and said, ‘Ah! A warm towel!  A delicious small delight’. Whether it is true or not, we were told that recently built houses have to have towel heaters installed in the bathrooms. What a wonderful regulation to introduce because there really is nothing nicer than having a lovely, fluffy, toasty towel at hand after a hot shower in a cold bathroom.

Another small delight was putting up a washing line right across the garden, from one boundary wall to the other. Not a great distance as you can imagine – about twenty metres or so – but the pleasure it gave us to be able to do a load of washing in our washing machine, peg it on the line and  put it all away later the same day was out of all proportion to the event. Similarly, opening the last box, unpacking it and putting the contents away gave us huge delight. I should qualify that statement – it was the last box inside the house, there are still quite a few down in the cellar. Now that all the inside boxes have been opened and place found for the contents, another small delight is to be able to open  a drawer or cupboard, put my hand in and find just what I am looking for. As you will gather, we finally found all the things we had been hoping to find. My laundry baskets appeared just after we had hung the first load of washing on the line, which was great because it meant that we didn’t have to cram everything back into a black garbage bag when it was dry. All the crockery also came to light and we could give our borrowed wares back to the owners.

Apart from regular trips to the recycling centre and to the supermarket we have hardly been out of the house. Another shelf has been added to the pantry as even the huge amount of space added last week turned out to be not quite enough. We now have our kitchen clock hanging on the wall and the grand-father clock seems to have regained its land-legs and put its sea-sickness behind it. When it was first unwrapped, it was very out of sorts and refused to strike correctly but a little TLC has done wonders and it is almost back to its old self.

I do apologise for such a short chapter and without photographs but when there is nothing to say, I can’t say anything.

Our place in France Chapter 4

A somewhat less frenetic week than last week, thank goodness. We took Pieter down to Toulouse on Sunday to catch his plane back to Mallorca and made a day of it although the airport is only about an hour and a half away. It was cloudy and fairly cool but a good day for driving and we enjoyed the trip there and back. Since then it has been a fairly solid grind of getting boxes emptied and disposed of and the contents put away. Neels has recycled a shelving unit that was previously in the lounge and made some splendid shelves for the pantry. I must be the only person in France to have blackwood pantry shelves!  It made a huge difference to the amount of storage space that I had and they were put to good use immediately. Another  couple of boxes out onto the verandah! Trying to find the right places for everything in the kitchen has also been quite a problem. There has to be a certain ‘flow’ so that one doesn’t have to walk backwards and forwards all the time while preparing a meal, and with a kitchen as small as mine is now, that flow is extra important or we would be tripping over each other all the time. Poor Neels! I have to feel sorry for him as each time he gets used to finding the coffee cups in one place, I decide that they would be better in another place and they all get whisked away and he has to find them all over again. But we are getting there. A couple of things that we would really like to have handy, but which have not yet appeared, are my laundry baskets and my cleaning cloths and the dishcloths. We are still using borrowed crockery as I just don’t seem to be able to pick the right box when it comes to unpacking our day-to-day plates, but we have now got all the cutlery and kitchen implements. So the Box Mountain in the kitchen is gradually diminishing although we still have seven to go.

I mentioned last time the wonderful aerobics workout we get while unpacking and have now decided to call it Boxercise. Those fitness ladies who used to go and punch a sandbag and called it Boxercise had really no idea of the real thing.  It goes like this :- select a box regardless of what the label says. You have as much chance of really getting what it says as anything else so just plough on. Split open the box with an extremely sharp box cutter and close the blade! Open the flaps and remove the top few centimetres of packaging paper and drop it on the floor. Take out the first mystery item and unwrap carefully. Find a flat surface to put it down on and repeat, each time bending further and further into the box until your hands are at toe level. By now you have a mountain of packaging paper and/or bubble wrap on the floor and an empty box. The next phase is to put all that wrapping back into the box, but somehow, even without the items that are now standing all around on any flat surface, it never fits so Neels has to get into the box and jump on the contents until we can fill it up. Then it gets tossed onto the verandah. Phase three is to cart all the boxes from the verandah down to the car and load as many as possible into the back. Then it’s off to the recycling centre. Here there are a number of large skips carefully positioned behind railings so that you can’t fall in by mistake. All that paper so carefully stuffed into the boxes now has to come out and be posted into a large bin with a ridiculously small opening until the box is empty once more. Using the very sharp box cutter again, open the other end of the box and flatten it. When there are two or three flattened boxes they can be carried to the other end of the centre and hurled into a skip. Bubblewrap goes into a separate skip  as does metal, but we don’t have much of that. And then we can go home and do it all over again.

We don’t get much time for doing anything else, and when we do have time we are generally exhausted and flopped out in front of the fire.

And there too, is something else we are not accustomed to having to do – wood for the fire has to be chopped into usable pieces. We learnt to our cost, many years ago, that a whole tree trunk will just not burn if it is put onto a fire. Neels doesn’t mind chopping wood, but a friend has lent us a wonderful toy called a log splitter. It is electric and hydraulic and is great fun to use as it does all the work itself as long as one is pulling the correct lever. Huge chunks of wood just give way as they are forced onto a V-shaped blade and make firewood seem easy. We are wondering how we can persuade the friend to part with his toy but it may be a difficult task.

Spring is definitely around the corner and we have great fun watching the birds on the church roof opposite our bedroom. We only have skylights, Veluxes, roof windows, whatever you want to call them, so they look upwards and all we can see from our room is part of the wall and the roof of the church next door. The other day when it was raining there were two pigeons up on the roof, the one definitely showing signs of amorous intentions. The other was not so keen and kept side-stepping along the ridge to get away. Then she fluttered down on to the rather steep roof and next minute she was skittering  down the wet tiles, slipping and sliding  and flapping madly to keep her balance. And then there are the sparrows. Also feeling the beginnings of Spring , they dart back and forth, inspecting all the cracks and crevices of our ancient church wall, seeking out possible prime nesting sites and bringing their mates along for a look. It may not be a view in the usual sense  but it keeps us entertained.

Well, I did warn you at the beginning that things may get a bit boring but hopefully by next week we will have cleared some space in the lounge and will be able to show you that.

Our place in France Chapter 3

An exhilarating week and an exhausting one. Exhilarating because the furniture arrived on Tuesday, finally, and exhausting because from then on it was one endless round of extreme aerobics. Bending down to lift heavy boxes; carrying them to another place; cutting them open and bending again to get down to the bottom of the box and then plenty of stretching to put things in their (hopefully) appointed places. My poor muscles don’t know what’s hit them and my back feels as if it’s about to give in. And it would be wonderful to be able to say that we have made great progress but although we have mountains of emptied and flattened boxes outside the door, and another, bigger mountain of boxes full of newsprint packing paper or bubble wrap, the house still seems to be filled to the brim with cardboard in one form or another.

However, let me start at the beginning. We had been told that the truck with its 40 foot container, which sounds so much bigger than a twelve point something-or-other metre, would be arriving in the village at 8.30 am. Horrors! That meant we would have to leave our ‘gite’ at about 7 am, in case they were a bit early. And that would mean getting up before the sparrows – a really difficult thing for us. We made it though, but only just. We were about five minutes away when we got a phone call asking where we were because they had arrived, and which side of the church was the house. We rushed along the last bit of twisty road and found that the container had in fact, not yet arrived but was sitting parked up at an intersection not far away. The three young unpackers had arrived beforehand in a smaller van and , ever wary of directing the huge vehicle into an impossible space, had first come to find the house before calling the container on. Even so, getting the container positioned correctly was quite a delicate job and only entailed blocking two of the access roads to the village for a short time!

Our new friend, Christian, heard the commotion and the shouting as the container was manoeuvred into place and strolled over to see if he could help in any way. What a bonus he turned out to be! Positioning himself near the back of the container and at the bottom of the front steps, he appointed himself ‘checker’ As each item emerged from the container, its number was called out and Christian crossed it off the list. Neels was standing nearby and he could read the label on each item and direct it to the ‘cave’ (cellar),’premier etage’ (first floor) or ‘en haute’ (upstairs). This stage of the delivery went really fast mostly because the container could only stay for three hours and then had to start back for Bordeaux. So our 264 items came literally flying out to be grabbed by one of the young men and dumped in the right (sort of) place in the house.

After days of miserable gloomy weather with intermittent rain and icy winds, Tuesday was a brilliant, sunny, windless day. We have learnt though, never to take the weather for granted and everyone was hustling to get all the items under cover in case the rain came again. Fortunately, it didn’t as a few things stood around outside for quite some time as we desperately tried to stretch the house walls to accommodate them.

Eventually it was all in and we could barely see one another for all the boxes. In places they were stacked three high which is equivalent to almost two meters. Then started the unpacking. We had decided beforehand that we only wanted the pieces of furniture unwrapped and the packaging taken away, although there was a minor lack of communication and some boxes got unpacked before we realised what was happening. By this time it was getting fairly late anyway, so we told the guys that they could go and that they need not return the following day. They were over the moon at that, but they had really worked hard for it. I wish I had had a video camera to film them getting the really big heavy stuff upstairs, but I didn’t even think about taking a photograph! The stairs are not wide, they have a right-angled bend at the bottom and are quite steep and we had to somehow get a queen-sized bed and mattress, a standard double bed and mattress and my enormous antique computer desk all upstairs. If it hadn’t been so ‘heart-in-the-mouth’, it would have been really funny. There was plenty of yelling and shouting; many ‘attende’s’ (wait) and much huffing and puffing. At one stage I looked up to see the shortest guy hanging on to my desk with one hand as the other two tried to let go below and transfer to higher up the stairs. It was only when he let out a sort of shriek that they quickly returned to where they had been and worked out another strategy. Finally everything was more or less where we wanted it and they went off.

The next day we started unpacking boxes in earnest. I know one should not joke about another person’s lack of language skills, but some of the labelling on the boxes gave us a few much needed smiles. Like the three boxes of ‘Office staff’ and one of ‘Cleaning staff’ that were among our goods. They should, of course, have been ‘office stuff’ and ‘cleaning stuff’. And another mystery box that we thought contained baskets. When opened we found all our many and varied buckets. The label said ‘Bakets’!

Our biggest problem is lack of storage space. There are no built-in cupboards in the bedrooms and building any is going to be decidedly tricky as the bedrooms are in the roof space and only have about 60 cms of vertical wall before the roof starts sloping up to the peak. We need our clothes badly as we are heartily sick and tired of the ones we brought with us, but I am nervous about opening a box and finding all our ‘hanging’ clothes and nowhere to hang them. It is the same in the pantry/kitchen. I was relying on the pantry space as a great storage area for all sorts of kitchen equipment, but the shelves have yet to be erected, but they can’t be because the pantry is full of boxes and there is very little place for them to go without enormous effort and as I said at the start, I am pretty nearly fresh out of effort.

However, on the plus side and with Pieter’s help, we have carpeting in the bedrooms and landing, we have a dividing wall between the workshop and the laundry and we have an enormous pile of firewood that had to be fetched and stacked, which we probably would have battled to do. We also would not have managed to unload the container so quickly if it hadn’t been for Christian managing the checklist as he could understand the numbers being called out to him in French. Finally, but not last, we have to thank our hosts Pat and Finlay for the use of their ‘gite’ without really knowing how long they were destined to be our hosts and to Finlay especially for the generosity he showed in allowing us to use all and any of the tools and equipment in his very well-stocked workshop. It was purely due to this generosity that we were even nearly ready to accept the furniture when it arrived.

Friday was a big day as we spent our first night in the house and how marvellous it was to sleep in our own bed again. Not that we haven’t been very comfortable where we are, but there is just something about one’s own bed.

Pieter has , sadly, to leave us on Sunday as he has things to attend to at home, but he will hopefully be back very soon. I hope that by then we will have the house all in order.